(a project of Mirravision Trust, Financed by Auroshakti Foundation)

A Psychological Approach to Sri Aurobindo's

The Life Divine

Book II

The Knowledge and the Ignorance-The Spiritual Evolution

Chapter 15

Reality and the Integral Knowledge

Part I

An integral spiritual Knowledge

Ignorance is that which forces us to live in an apparently separative surface existence cutting us from our own integrality and true self. An inner turn towards Knowledge needs a replacement of the separative consciousness by an integral consciousness. "The integral Knowledge is something that is already there in the integral Reality... it is a Truth that is self-revealed to a spiritual endeavour." (CWSA 21-22, pg.659) It does not need to be constructed or uncovered. This knowledge is not dependent on our mind. It is veiled in our greater self and as our self is identified with the world-self, we are led from self-knowledge to an integral world-knowledge.

An integral spiritual Knowledge or consciousness spans from the Superconscience to the Inconscience and thus achieves an indivisible whole. Above it opens to the Superconscious influences. Below it is aware that the Superconscient attributes are involved and dispersed in the Inconscient from where they are released during the evolution of consciousness and thus illumining the meaning of the universal play. In this play the individual is not demeaned or abolished but transformed from the lower Nature to the Higher Divine Nature and Divine Reality.

An absolutism is not the whole Truth

An integral knowledge indicates a Truth-Consciousness which is the consciousness of an integral Reality. But our idea of the Reality varies with the poises we take - it can be inclusive, exclusive or comprehensive. (Ibid, pg.660) It is quite possible to consider the Absolute or Brahman as the only Reality while the cosmos and the individual are just a temporal phenomenon. To reach the Absolute, both Knowledge and Ignorance as well as the ego-consciousness and cosmic consciousness have to be transcended. The Absolute Brahman remains unattainable. But we can have an opposite view as well. The Ignorance can be viewed as a "limited or an involved action of the divine Knowledge, limited in the partly conscient, involved in the inconscient". (Ibid, pg.661) In fact, what we call Knowledge is itself a higher Ignorance as it stops short of the absolutism of the Brahman. "This absolutism corresponds to a truth of thought...but by itself it is not the whole of spiritual thought complete and comprehensive and it does not exhaust the possibilities of the supreme spiritual experience". (Ibid)

The absolutist vision of Reality has a basis in earliest Vedantic thought. However in the Upanishads which is the inspired scripture of Vedanta, we find the experience-concept of the Absolute as the utter Transcendence but also as a corollary and not necessarily as a contradiction the experience-concepts of the cosmic Self and the Individual self. Thus instead of an exclusive affirmation negating everything than the transcendent Absolute, we have a comprehensive view of Reality. This affirms that Ignorance is a half-veiled part of Knowledge and that world-knowledge is reflected in self-knowledge.

"The Isha Upanishad insists on the unity and reality of all the manifestations of the Absolute; it refuses to confine truth to any one aspect". (Ibid, pg.662) Brahman is the Being and all becomings, the One who has become All. "To live in the cosmic Ignorance is a blindness, but to confine oneself in an exclusive absolutism of Knowledge is also a blindness." (Ibid) An integral knowledge requires the simultaneous realisation of the transcendent and the cosmic self, a simultaneous attainment of the Becoming and Non-Becoming. It is this whole consciousness that builds the foundation of the Life Divine. The Absolute Reality is not "a rigid indeterminable oneness"; (Ibid) all affirmations and negations express its aspects.

We can have thus two views of Reality. The first view poises exclusively and solely on the Being -- the silent, inactive, immobile Self or Purusha. The rest of the existence is dismissed as due to an illusory Maya or a formative Prakriti - a falsity of an unreal being. One becomes free to arrive at a liberation of the spirit

The second view believes in a Becoming as a true movement of the Being. Both the Being and the Becoming are considered to be truths of one absolute Reality. The truth is bound "neither by our Knowledge, nor by our Ignorance, neither by our concept of existence nor by our concept of non-existence". (Ibid, pg.663) Neither can it be limited by any incapacity to manifest relations: on the contrary, the power to manifest relations can be regarded as a sign of its very absoluteness, "and this possibility is in itself a sufficient explanation of cosmic existence". (Ibid, pg.663-664)

Realisable actuality

The Absolute is thus not bound to manifest a cosmos of relations but it is neither bound not to manifest any cosmos. The Absolute is full and vibrant, not a vacant Absolute. Our concept of the Void exists because it surpasses all cognitive phenomena. Indeed the Absolute holds in itself "some ineffable essentiality of all that is". (Ibid, pg.664) It must hold the permanent truth of the realisable actuality of all that is fundamental to the world's existence. "It is this realisable actuality actualized or this permanent truth deploying its possibilities that we call manifestation and see as the universe." (Ibid)

Beyond Cognition

Actually the concept of an unreal Reality, of an absolute non-manifest Parabrahman results due to our cognitive incapacity. Pushed beyond a limit, cognition loses its way and becomes inactive and that cessation of cognition is then transferred to the concept of Reality, making it unreal. The existence of an apparent reality then becomes in the "nature of an Is that is not, a magical Maya". (Ibid) However we need not judge the Absolute in terms of our cognitive incapacity. The Absolute has "no need of self-escape and no reason for refusing to cognize whatever is to it cognizable". (Ibid, pg.665)

Unmanifest Unknowable and Manifest Knowable

We have thus two experiential concepts, that of the unmanifest Unknowable and that of the manifest knowable which is partly manifest to the Ignorance and fully manifest to the divine Knowledge. But irrespective of our Ignorance or Knowledge, whatever manifests must have its origin in what we call the Unmanifest for nothing else can exist. There is the Oneness "and through the diversity we can touch the Oneness". (Ibid, pg.665) But despite accepting this position we can still reject the Becoming to return to the absolute Being. This becomes possible if we distinguish between the real reality of the Unmanifest and the misleading reality of the manifest universe.

Therefore we have the duality of the One and the Many, of the formless and the form, of Spirit and Matter, of the Superconscient and Inconscient. And to escape from the duality we ascribe Knowledge to the One Being, the Superconscient, formless Spirit and view the other -the Becoming as reflecting Ignorance. And we come to the solution of rejecting the Ignorance, the Becoming and shift to the other extreme of Knowledge, to the Being or Unmanifest Reality. It is as if the Eternal is our only refuge and all the rest are transient and false values and our earthly life is "a self-bewilderment of the soul in phenomenal nature". (Ibid, pg.666) But Sri Aurobindo points out that the apparently opposite terms "are not so much opposites as complements of one another"...they are actually "double and concurrent values which explain each other; not hopelessly incompatible alternatives, but two faces of the one Reality.." (Ibid, pg.666-667) Knowledge invariably belongs to the Being, the One Reality while Ignorance "is a self-oblivion of Being". (Ibid, pg.667) Ignorance is actually the experience of separateness in the multiplicity but is corrected by the soul in the Becoming growing into knowledge. "The integral knowledge of Brahman is a consciousness in possession of both together, and the exclusive pursuit of either closes the vision to one side of the truth of the omnipresent Reality....The knowledge of the Becoming is a part of knowledge; it acts as an Ignorance only because we dwell imprisoned in it, avidyayam antare, without possessing the Oneness of the Being, which is its base, its stuff, its spirit, its cause of manifestation and without which it could not be possible."

It is easier to find Brahman as one in a featureless oneness of the Absolute rather than in the multiplicity. But the infinity of the multiplicity is best explained when it is possessed in the infinity of the One while the infinity of the One pours itself out in the infinity of the Many. To be capable of that outpouring of its energies while remaining detached from it is "the divine strength of the free Purusha, the conscious Soul in its possession of its own immortal self-knowledge." (Ibid, pg.668)

"The Divine Being is not incapable of taking innumerable forms because He is beyond all forms in His essence, nor by assuming them does He lose His divinity, but pours out rather in them the delight of His being and the glories of His godhead; this gold does not cease to be gold because it shapes itself into all kinds of ornaments and coins itself into many currencies and values.." (Ibid, pg.668) Likewise the Earth-Power does not lose her immutable divinity because she forms herself into habitable worlds. "The apparent Inconscience of the material universe holds in itself darkly all that is eternally self-revealed in the luminous Superconscient; to reveal it in Time is the slow and deliberate delight of Nature and the aim of her cycles." (Ibid)

- By Dr. Soumitra Basu